Lauren May

Victoria: So if you can briefly start by introducing yourself and your position in the organization.

Lauren: Sure my name is Lauren May. I am the homeless shelter coordinator here at the First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village. What this means is that I train and recruit volunteers, I also oversee the shelter itself. Checking attendance rates, preparing and buying food and just kind of keeping the lights on, so that’s my thing

V: And what exactly do you focus on with homelessness and poverty and all that?

L: Okay well here at the shelter we do immediate emergency needs so we provide beds and shelter to ten single adult men who are experiencing homelessness right now. We provide and light meal and also other immediate needs like clothing, hot hand warmers in the winter, just very basic, very just keep you running. I also work as a case manager at the main entrance drop-in center. Where I help people apply for city housing applications, as well as apply for job training, public assistance, social security, get state ID, really everything they need to get on the way to stable, permanent housing.

V: So homelessness raises questions that are similar to poverty so can we start by asking you for your definition of poverty?

L: Okay, poverty is a mix of financial and social experiences which make it so you are living below society’s definition of what a normal or typical life is. In this case, I’m afraid to say I’m blanking on what our definition of the poverty level is right now. Basically I would define it as the inability for example, to rent or buy your own private space of residence. It’s the inability to provide nutritious food for yourself or anyone in your care on a regular basis. It’s having difficulty getting regular transportation. It’s basically being unable to meet your needs but there’s also mental poverty kind of just living stress and anxiety not being able to meet your physical needs creates and encourages.

V: So in the last few years, which demographics have you encountered most in your line of work, including ethnicity, gender, all that.

L: Uh mostly I work with single adult men, mostly african American and latino men but I am seeing a spike in white men as well. I do work with single women. Interesting enough, and people who are coming from the south and moving to up New York for resources because there’s actually even fewer resources down in Alabama and Georgia, south of the Carolinas and so they’re coming up for better resources or to stay with family. Primarily single men of color is who I roll with.

V: And like the government and media portrays poverty in a certain way do you agree with how the government is portraying it?

L: Oh I think it’s insane. I’m afraid to say our legislators have a very weird idea of what the day to day experience of living in poverty is like. And we have all these horrific legislative acts going on right now in Kansas, Iowa, pretty much every republican-run state in our good union. It’s having these very strange ideas of living in poverty, to be poor is to be in this Oliver twist novel where you are literally just empty shelves, sleeping on the sidewalk, wearing ratty thirdhand, fourthhand, fifthhand clothes. It’s this notion you should be grateful for subhuman treatment, you know, expired food, going to soup kitchens, staying in cots in the gym of a highschool because the shelter in your town is overfull. It’s this notion of you shouldn’t want more than the bare necessities. I think that’s horrifying. I really disagree with a lot of legislation and discussion going on right now, our lovely lovely leadership. And I do think a lot of dramatic changes need to go down very quickly.

V: So with those types of changes what have you and your colleagues done to address the poverty issue and level?

L: Well mostly my program is very big on finding people stable housing so studio 1 bedroom apartments here in the city. We also are very big on independent incomes. In this case, we send people, if they need job training, or they need to finish their education like get a GED or get an associate’s. We help them find programs they can attend. We are also very big on work training so everything from becoming a licensed driver for say, FreshDirect, to getting construction machinery training, home health aide training. Really any kind of job that is in high need, can be trained quickly, we do our damndest to get people hooked up with the skills and the education they need to have independent incomes.

V: So do you have any recommendations for what college students can do to address this problem?

L: Volunteer!!! For the love of all that is good on this earth, volunteer! You are young, you are energetic. My shelter runs on you guys so volunteer. We’re open next november. Seriously, volunteering, getting involved in local area politics. Seriously, volunteering for campaigns for the mayor’s office, for state senator, for city council folk. Really just being involved, and please for all that is good the next time you pass a homeless person on the street don’t you dare just assume he’s high or drunk or crazy. Statistically, they are most likely the victim of identity fraud, the 2008 recession, or a massive sudden medical or financial debt they did not have the financial backings to handle. Seriously folks, you are most likely going to experience at least 18 months of unsteady housing yourself in your life. That’s true, 80% of you will, so please be kind, if nothing else, be kinder, be nice , carry granola bars in your backpack to give to people. Donate to city harvest. Be decent. Come on guys.

V: Two of the things you just mentioned with the campaigns, how do you feel about anti-poverty campaigns? The current ones?

L: Here in the city, poor deBlasio. He’s doing a lot of damage control from our previous mayor’s administration. And there’s so much you can do in a year’s term but a lot more needs to be done. Some really interesting work is coming from private organizations that are legislating to city council to this date. Government, our actual elected officials aren’t doing a lot. There is progress though, for example, they recently decided to expand the number of beds for homeless youth, which is great. But in a few years there’s going to be a massive budget cut to social services. Again, vote, vote, you are deciding this. Seriously, there’s big budget cutoffs and everyone’s panicking. And sadly when budget cuts come, the people who get cut are the people who need the most help and it’s just awful, so really there needs to be a dramatic change in housing law, in welfare. So many things need tweaking. It can seem a little overwhelming, which is very reasonable and very fair. But you really just have to tackle any little problem because in fact a small change can affect hundreds if not thousands of people. And honestly, the more changes, the more people they can help. Who doesn’t like that?

V: The second thing I wanted to address is how did you feel the 2008 recession affected New York City poverty levels?

L: Oh it was just the worst thing that could have happened to this city outside of a natural disaster. Just the huge layoffs. If you guys don’t know, New York City is a safe shelter city which means anyone who is within the city limits, so within the 5 boroughs, the city must provide them shelter. That’s not the same as housing. Like the guys in my parlor are receiving shelter by sleeping on cots, you know. The fact is that NYC is only one of the 5 cities in the country that does this. And so as a result, since 2008, thousands of people have come to NY seeking shelter and they stayed here, which I think they have the right to, no problem with that. But it has created a huge strain on the city’s budget, on resources; more people, same number of beds, big problem. Additionally it’s things like a lot of the jobs, a lot of the jobs have been created but not all the jobs have come back, so it’s a big issue of we either need to create more jobs or find some way of helping out a lot of people very quickly. We’re 7 years on but you can still see kind of the sting for some people.

V: And then a question that we have is do you think determining who is becoming impoverished is becoming increasingly difficult? And why or why not?

L: I think it’s just- I feel like our poverty laws and our standards have really not kept up with our understanding of – well the inflation is ridiculous. The cost of real estate in the city to rent or buy has skyrocketed. And the big thing is the fact that wages haven’t gone up. I’m a fan of the fight for 15, basically 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Again, vote, advocate. It’s- the thing is basically wages are not keeping up. Literally, a study was done that shows, in all 50 states, if you were working full time, 40 hours a week on minimum wage, there is nowhere in this country you could afford a 2 bedroom apartment. So if you have kids, you are screwed. But really, I think we need to change our notion of poverty to instead of one of the deserving poor, I guess you could say this notion of only people who are truly at the absolute rock bottom, almost subhuman level of poverty. It’s that notion of they’re deserving, they’re fine, oh you know, just bad luck on them. Instead we need to change instead of being a deserving poverty, we need dignity, enforced. This notion of you know what, a mom with kids is occasionally going to want to see a movie now and then, plus when she does, she’ll buy popcorn and stimulate the economy. We need to really bring dignity back to the talk of poverty and we also need more people who have had experience or who have worked with it to be advocating. the fact is, the vast majority of folks who are in elected leadership, probably have not experienced poverty as they know it or even work especially as they don’t know it, as it really is lived instead of being in 1903. So I really think we need more community speaking up, more young people speaking up. the fact is that unemployment in people under 25 is dramatically higher than the general population. So we just need more people talking, and I think that’s the big important thing.

V: Do you have any last few comments that you would like to share with us?

L: If you don’t know your major, go into social work. I don’t know, the big thing is just never ever assume you know why someone is having a rough time, or how they came to have a hard time. And even if- i’m not just speaking about homeless people here- but even if you know, you see somebody at the grocery store buying something with a SNAP or with a food stamps card, leave them alone, they have just as much right to be there as you do. And also again, seriously, really, vote. Think citywide campaigns, even if you’re not from New York, get involved, just read everything, talk to people, listen to different points of views. Just be nice people. Seriously, just be nice, come on.

V: Thank you so much. That’s it. 

 

Professor Leonard Rodberg

Freda: Can you please introduce yourself briefly and tell me about the field you specialize in?

Professor Rodberg: Ok well my name is Leonard Rodberg. I’m chair of the Department of Urban Studies. Our department, let me focus more on our department than my specific work. Our department was founded in 1971 by a number of people who had sort of come of age in the 1960s which was a period of activism and the origin of the war on poverty and in addition the notion of community control and providing more democracy in our policymaking and our actions. And so this department was created with the idea that it would develop students who were conscious of the inequalities in our societies and prepare to do something about it. So just to give you the clearest example our introductory course is not called introduction to urban studies. It is called Urban Poverty and Affluence and it focuses on inequality in this cities and other cities in America and around the world.

F: What makes someone impoverished in NYC? Is it just the homeless man on the street or is it somebody that is less conspicuous? 

R: A lot of people who are less conspicuous. The federal government has a definition of poverty which was in fact created in the early 1960s and according to that definition, one quarter of the people in New York City are poor. In fact, I think in realistic terms the number is even higher because of the high cost of housing in this city. A much higher percentage of people’s income in this city goes to housing than any other city in the United States. I would define poverty as the inability to provide a decent standard of living. Then you might say what do I mean by decent standard of living and what I mean is the conventional understanding of the way people should live in the United States in this era and I don’t mean the way people live in some impoverished country in the third world. I mean in the United States. And we have a certain standard, which we expect people to be fed decently, to have decent housing, to have access to healthcare and to be able to take care of their children safely and in healthy circumstances

F: How does the growing inequality gap contribute to poverty?

R: Well it’s a reflection of the fact that in fact, according to federal statistics, poverty, the level of poverty, the percent of people in this country that is poor, the percent of people in New York City that are poor had not declined in 50 years. It’s just about where it was. About 1 out of every 12 Americans nationwide is poor, as I said it’s a higher percentage in New York City. New York City is also one of the most unequal cities in the country. We have, at last count, 80 billionaires living here and 2 million people, a quarter of our population is poor, that does not have enough money to provide adequate nutrition, decent housing. People are living doubled up, tripled up in their housing because of the high cost of housing. What’s really happened is that the job market has changed in that period and our public policy really hasn’t kept pace with it. I think, if you want to point to one thing that has had the biggest impact is the decline in unionized jobs. The average manufacturing working used to make a middle class living, but most of those manufacturing and middle class jobs have disappeared. There are very few left in New York City and those manufacturing jobs that are here aren’t unionized. And without unions, workers are at the mercy of employers who want to cut costs and keep wages low. A favorite statistic is that the rate of productivity growth in this country has continued. So productivity continues to climb. Workers continue to become more and more productive as a result of computerization and automation, but wages have not kept pace with it. So what’s happened, who is benefited from that increased productivity, it’s the wealthy. That’s the result we see in the growing inequality between the rich and the poor. 

F: Do you think that putting money in the hands of the wealthy is a good thing? People say they know what to do with the money, they can provide people with jobs. What are your thoughts?

R: Well you can see the results. The result is not that at all. The result is, as I said, the number of people living below the poverty level has remained constant even as the wealthy have gotten wealthier. There are a number of government programs that have tried to alleviate some of the problem. We have Medicaid, which provides healthcare for many low-income people in NYC and NYS. It has a very generous Medicaid program. We have the earned income tax credit. If you have a job and your job doesn’t pay enough for you to live decently the government in fact, will rebate you a certain amount of money to enable you to live decently. There are housing benefits but those are very limited and haven’t grown with the need for low-income housing in this country. So the government has done some things, but the emphasis, you don’t find any discussion on poverty today in the public policy discourse. What you find is the discussion of deficits and how we have to cut back on government programs whereas in fact, the need is even greater. One other thing that’s happened is that the minimum wage, which is set up to try to provide a floor for income in this country hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living so the minimum wage today is worth about two-thirds of what it was 20 years ago. And we have many more low-wage workers, in fast food industry and in the hotel industry, which are the growing industries, rather than in the high wage manufacturing industries we used to have which have been migrated overseas. 

F: Tell me about the 2008 recession. Who was most affected by it? Was it a certain race, ethnicity, business, group of people?

R: Actually I think everybody was affected. In New York, people know that a lot of Wall St. bankers lost their jobs or traders, because the stock market collapsed and their jobs went with it. Some investment banks were closed but what has happened is that across the board, people lost their jobs, but eventually employment is coming back. The unemployment has dropped but the jobs that people are getting are not paying as much as the jobs they had 5 years ago. The best statistic I’ve seen is that the average wage today of people who lost their jobs and have now gotten new ones is about three quarters of what their income was. So everybody is poorer than they used to be, except the very wealthy who continue to enjoy the fruits of growth in productivity 

F: What did the government do to solve combat poverty and help people recover from the effects of the 2008 recession?

R: Well there was a stimulus program for two years. It lasted for about a year and a half to two years after the 2008-2009 recession. It helped stabilize the economy and provide some useful work for a lot of people, highway construction went on, but that money is gone now. It has been spent and hasn’t been renewed and the private sector is growing. As I said unemployment is down but wages are not up. Wages have not increased to keep pace with the cost of living or productivity, what people are actually producing. And so you see responses not very much from government, particularly given the log jam in Washington, but you see people who work in fast food restaurants around the country demanding a living wage. I mean getting paid 7-8 dollars an hour, which is about $15,000 a year is not enough to live off of. That means if you have one child, you’re poor by federal standards. And so people are demanding a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, which would give them an income of $30,000 a year, which is close to what people would consider a living wage for an individual. As I said, the industries that are growing are not unionized and so workers don’t have the leverage to demand the kinds of wages that manufacturing workers could demand 20-30 years ago. But unionization is coming to the fast food industry. It’s already reached a lot of the hotel industry and workers are demanding that they get some share of the pie that they’re producing. 

F: What can a student do to spread awareness of poverty and help mitigate it?

R: Well this college, this campus, and campuses around the state have an organization on campus called NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group, which helps train students to be activists, to do community organizing, to lobby in Albany for improved benefits from the state. And students of course can become educated as citizens, while they’re students. And when they graduate, they can participate in moving this society to become more equal and more generous of a society. With the growth of what we’re experiencing, there’s no excuse for people being poor and living in this country. The statistics are really shameful that 1 in 8 people is still poor.